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The Top 5

I want to start this week’s issue with a quick note to address two pieces of business:

Saying thanks

Giving something away

Thanks:

I want to give a big shoutout to the folks at Zendesk for guest posting a piece I wrote on curated support newsletters. I know a few of you are new this week because of this piece. I’m happy to have you here and feel free to hit reply on any issue to share feedback or just say hi.

Giveaway:

Speaking of Zendesk, they’re hosting their Relate Live conference in May and have an excellent lineup of speakers and sessions planned. We have an extra ticket to the event that I want to give to one of you.

How much time off is too much—will I get a stern talking-to if I take four weeks off in a year? Five? Six? Should I feel guilty about putting my team in a tight spot? What about that workaholic jerk setting an unhealthy precedent by never taking any time off—does leadership secretly wish everyone were more like him?

Not long ago, my friends and yours at Support Driven held another survey for folks working in customer support roles in the tech community. As always, the results were really interesting, and I took a little time to visualize the data.

The emergence of chatbots could have profound implications for brand interactions with their customers. Agencies say they're getting more inquiries from brands and more business pitches from platforms.

I wanted to get a first hand look at how the process worked to see if there were any improvements we could make. So I informed Ben Deda, who heads up our Customer Experience team, that I was going to sit on the Help Desk for a day – the 23rd of December – to find out for myself.

Newegg already offers support through email, text, phone, and chat, and views Messenger as the next frontier to improve its customer relations, according to its senior vice president of sales and marketing, Merle McIntosh.